In the 2025 IT Brand Pulse Enterprise Infrastructure for AI survey, where real IT professionals, not algorithms, select brand leaders, Dell Technologies once again distinguished itself as the top choice for Primary Storage for AI. The results reflect not only Dell’s long history of leadership in enterprise storage, but also the company’s significant momentum over 2024 as AI workloads became larger, faster, and more demanding.
According to the 2025 survey results, Dell received 29.4% of all Market Leader votes, outpacing Pure Storage (25.5%) and NetApp (15.7%). For Innovation Leader, Dell earned 27.1%, surpassing Pure Storage (23.1%), a notable reversal from 2024, when Pure Storage led innovation perceptions.
This combination of Market and Innovation leadership, based entirely on human voting, signals that practitioners recognize Dell as both the most trusted and the most forward-thinking provider of storage systems for AI.
A History of Leadership in Enterprise Storage
Dell Technologies enters the AI era with decades of experience delivering storage platforms engineered for reliability, scalability, and enterprise-grade data protection. As organizations began training larger models and deploying high-throughput inference systems, Dell’s storage portfolio, long proven in mission-critical workloads, naturally became the backbone for early AI deployments.
This trusted foundation allowed Dell to evolve quickly. As AI shifted from experimentation to production, customers increasingly selected Dell to power their data pipelines, high-performance flash architectures, and GPU-accelerated infrastructures.
2024 to 2025: A Significant Leap Forward
The year-over-year comparison underscores Dell’s rising momentum. In 2024, Dell already held the lead in Market Leadership for Primary Storage for AI. But in 2025, Dell widened the gap and overtook Pure Storage in Innovation Leadership, becoming the leader in both dimensions.
The survey’s comparison chart shows votes for Dell increasing across both Market and Innovation categories, while IT pro votes for Pure and NetApp remained flat or declined.
This progress reflects real-world adoption trends: enterprises continue to scale AI workloads, and Dell is delivering the performance, capacity, and reliability needed to support them.
Why IT Pros Selected Dell as the Market Leader
- Proven ability to support large-scale AI pipelines. AI training and inference require extremely high throughput, parallelism, and consistent latency. Dell’s architecture, engineered for flash-intensive environments, excels at feeding GPUs without bottlenecks.
- Integration with leading GPU-centric compute ecosystems. As highlighted in the survey summary, Dell’s deep partnership with NVIDIA strengthens its AI storage leadership, ensuring validated architectures and tuned solutions that perform predictably in production.
- Enterprise trust and operational maturity. With global support, supply chain strength, and mature lifecycle management, Dell remains a safe and dependable choice for IT teams.
Why Dell Is Perceived as the Innovation Leader
- Delivering innovation that matters to AI practitioners. Dell’s advancements focus on real AI needs: parallel IO, AI-optimized flash, GPU-to-storage throughput, and high-bandwidth ingest.
- Aligning product roadmaps with AI transformation. Rather than chasing short-term performance metrics, Dell is shaping long-term architectures for AI factories, hybrid AI deployments, and on-prem AI clouds.
- Rapid progress relative to competitors. The 2024 to 2025 innovation comparison shows Dell dramatically improving its position, from 11.6% to 27.1%, the strongest upward shift in the category.
Conclusion
In a year defined by explosive demand for AI-ready infrastructure, Dell Technologies earned the most human votes for both Market Leader and Innovation Leader in Primary Storage for AI. These results affirm Dell’s unique combination of reliability, scale, and innovation, and its growing role as the storage foundation of the world’s emerging AI data centers.
About IT Brand Pulse AI Surveys
Winning AI infrastructure brand surveys matters because leaders are chosen by humans, not algorithms. IT pro votes reflect real-world experience, trust, and performance in the field, and the results signal which companies practitioners rely on most to guide them through the rapidly evolving AI infra landscape. Responses are solicited from over 1,000,000 members of on-line groups and the IT Brand Pulse IT Pro and end-user database. Learn more about brand leader surveys at www.itbrandpulse.com.
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